Abstract

Mathew Carey was one of the most popular and influential economic writers of his day, but his work has been largely overlooked by modern writers, who tend to focus on more scholarly writers or on precursors to contemporary classical economics. Carey was a self-taught printer and publisher who rejected Adam Smith, led the early fight for protective tariffs, and wrote hundreds of newspaper articles to convince the public of the need to protect American manufacturers. “The New Olive Branch” is Carey’s most important, accessible, and sustained elaboration of his political-economic ideas, and is accompanied in this volume by portions of his “Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry” (1822), which offer further insight into his rejection of classical economics.

Mathew Carey’s long-neglected “The New Olive Branch” offers new insight into political economy as it really happened. This is the first-ever scholarly edition of Carey’s most important economic work. Like other volumes in Anthem’s “Economic Ideas that Built America” series, it gives the reader easy access to historical works that have been dropped from the modern economic canon because of their uncomfortable fit with contemporary conceptions of classical economics rooted in the work of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus.

In “The New Olive Branch,” Carey derided those so-called classical economists as visionary theorists with little grasp of real-world problems. Rejecting grand theories, Carey instead looked to historical examples and statistics to argue that government policy, and particularly the protection of manufacturers, was crucial to the development of a strong, independent American economy. In this volume, “The New Olive Branch” is accompanied by portions of Carey’s “Addresses of the Philadelphia Society for the Promotion of National Industry” (1822), which offer further insight into his rejection of classical economics.

While such views have long been out of fashion, overtaken by the popularity of classical economics, they were extremely influential in early America. Carey’s arguments illuminate how a large proportion of Americans thought about their economy while providing a corrective to the anachronistic overemphasis of the role of laissez-faire economics in early America.

Lawrence A. Peskin is professor of history at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, and is the author of “Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry,” “Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816,” and numerous articles.